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Richard Barthelmess was born in 1895 to a theatrical family and was working on the stage when a friend of his mother, film star Alla Nazimova, offered him a part in her next film, War Brides. He made twenty-two movies over the next three years, but it was his performance as the Chinese immigrant Cheng Huan in D.W. Griffith's Broken Blossoms that brought him his most lasting fame. He followed that up with two more classics, Way Down East and Tol'able David, the former for Griffith again, the latter at Barthelmess's own newly-formed production company, Inspiration Pictures.
He was nominated for an Oscar in 1929, the first year of the award's existence, losing to Emil Jannings.
Barthelmess continued to make movies during the sound era, including The Last Flight which I reviewed earlier this week, and The Cabin in the Cotton with Bette Davis (the one where she says "I'd like to kiss you, but I just washed my hair"), but by and large his acting technique was too stiff for sound pictures and the size and number of his parts quickly diminished. Probably his last great film role was as Bat MacPherson in Howard Hawks's Only Angels Have Wings.
Barthelmess made his last movie in 1942 then joined the Naval Reserve. After the war, he returned to Long Island, New York, where he died of cancer in 1963.
I've got a number of essays in the works—the best screenplay of 1931-32, a special Katie award for cinematography, another for short subject—but in the meantime, I chased down William Dieterle's The Last Flight, one of the movies that didn't make the cut come Katie nomination time. It has a high rating on the Internet Movie Database, ranking thirteenth among those movies released in 1931—undeservedly, as it turns out, but not bad either if you keep your expectations in check.
Another in a cycle of World War I flyer movies, The Last Flight follows four wounded pilots—"spent bullets" one doctor calls them—as they nurse their physical and psychological wounds by boozing their way through postwar Paris and Lisbon. (The screen shots are from the websites Shadowplay and Booze Movies: The 100 Proof Film Guide.)
Richard Barthelmess plays Cary Lockwood, a pilot with badly burned hands and an even more badly burned psyche. Trained for war, ill-equipped for peace, Cary and his pals remain in Europe, drinking to anaesthetize the pain. Pretty soon they're drinking because they can't do anything else.
Taking up with the boys is an eccentric American girl, Nikki (Helen Chandler), who drinks, collects turtles in her bathtub and is not the least bit apologetic about her turned-up nose—very much the kind of woman you'd fall for whether in a movie, in a bar or across your neighbor's fence. She seems to grasp that the boys are as ready to crumble as stale cake and she makes no demands of them other than that they scrub her back and listen to her goofy, elliptical stories.
She's especially drawn to Barthelmess's Cary, the most fragile of the bunch, and to the extent that this character-driven study has any forward momentum at all, the budding relationship between the dotty Nikki and the desperate Cary provides it.
"What are you changing your shoes for?" ask the boys as she readies to chase Barthelmess to his favorite bar.
"On account of I can walk faster in red shoes," says Nikki.
You betcha.
The Last Flight suffers from the problems characteristic of many of Hollywood's early sound efforts—wooden line readings, awkward pauses and portentous, stage-bound dialogue. A good example of the latter would be that "spent bullets" line I mentioned earlier, a nifty metaphor pounded into utter submission with the following speech, typical of some of the screenplay's clunkier efforts:
"Spent bullets. (pause) That's it. They're like projectiles (pause) shaped for war and hurled at the enemy. (pause) They've described a beautiful, high, arching trajectory (pause) and now they've fallen back to earth. (pause) Spent. (pause) Cooled off. (pause) Useless."
I expected something in there about how a factory in Detroit had been converted over to wartime production and maybe even the pilots' dog tag numbers, but I guess the screenwriter (John Monk Saunders, who the year before won an Oscar for another WWI flyer movie, The Dawn Patrol) didn't want to hit that metaphor too hard.
The real problem with the movie, though, is not that it's over-written, it's under-written. I like a languidly-paced character study as much as the next man if the dialogue is sharp and the episodes are illustrative of something, but there's nothing much more at work here than to repeat over and over again that these guys left the best of themselves on the battlefield, an insight firmly established early then never deepened or built upon. It's as if Saunders started reading The Sun Also Rises, fell in love with the drunk scenes and determined to rip off as much as he could—there's even a bullfight!
"Road to hell paved with un-bought stuffed dogs," you can almost hear Hemingway saying, "Not my fault."
"Gary" at "Booze Movies" opines that "The film would have likely been even more powerful as a silent." I think he's right. William Dieterle, who later directed such movies as The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) and The Devil and Daniel Webster and was nominated for an Oscar for The Life of Emile Zola, was an accomplished visual stylist whose pictures here almost overcome the limitations of the acting and the screenplay.
The movie catches Barthelmess in the middle of his long, painful transition from silent film star (Broken Blossoms, Way Down East) to forgotten character actor 
(e.g., Only Angels Have Wings, again as a pilot with burned hands). He often played his characters from a boxer's crouch—shoulders hunched, lips tight, eyes gazing into the distance like he's waiting for the next blow to land. Here his style suits the movie just fine.
Helen Chandler, who plays Nikki, was a highly-regarded stage actress who unfortunately never learned to dial it down for the movies and she overplays here. Still, she's adorable in a clumsy puppy dog sort of way and is the best thing in the movie. She left Hollywood in 1937, wound up in a sanitarium to treat an alcohol and drug addiction and was badly burned while smoking in bed. She and her lovely throat are perhaps best remembered now for playing Mina across from Bela Lugosi in the 1931 version of Dracula. (For a nice little biography, check out the TCM Movie Morlocks post "Lost in a Dream Sometimes.")
Of the other players, the less said the better. Johnny Mack Brown, a former running back at Alabama, made a sackful of B-Westerns that spanned nearly forty years. David Manners never found much success as an actor, spent less than a decade in Hollywood, then wrote novels until his death at the age of ninety-seven. Elliott Nugent worked primarily as a director, including five Bob Hope comedies.
The theme of men broken by war and lost in peace is explored to much greater effect in the novels of Ernest Hemingway and the short stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and in such movies as The Best Years of Our Lives, Three Comrades, The Enchanted Cottage, Coming Home and Key Largo. Nor does The Last Flight measure up to the movies that I have nominated for Katie Awards in any of the various categories. But if you stumble across it on cable one day or otherwise can dig up a free copy, The Last Flight is worth a look.
Note: After the movie's release, a stage version of the story, Nikki, ran on Broadway. The production starred Fay Wray, and in the role of Cary Lockwood, a young actor named Archie Leach. Sometime after, Leach changed his name to "Cary Grant," moved to Hollywood and made some movies which I suspect we here at the Monkey will wind up talking about at some length.
I've theoretically left silent movies behind but I wanted to mention that TCM is showing my choice for the best movie of 1919, D.W. Griffith's Broken Blossoms, on Monday, July 20, 2009, at 12:15 a.m. (i.e., Sunday night).
Like most of Griffith's work, the portrayals of race—in this case, a Chinese immigrant in London played by Richard Barthelmess—may make it a difficult movie for a modern audience. Plus, unlike the genres of comedy, horror or action, silent dramas generally don't hold up that well. But if you're approaching the work of D.W. Griffith for the first time, this might be the route to take.
In reviewing Broken Blossoms for his series on great movies, Roger Ebert noted that it was "perhaps the first interracial love story in the movies" and that it directly influenced Federico Fellini's classic, La Strada. He also said of its star, Lillian Gish, "her face is the first I think of among the silent actresses, just as Chaplin and Keaton stand side by side among the men." (He also passed along this anecdote from the filming of The Whales of August, a 1987 film co-starring Gish and screen legend Bette Davis: "One day after finishing a shot, [director Lindsay Anderson] said, 'Miss Gish, you have just given me the most marvelous closeup!' 'She should,' Bette Davis observed dryly. 'She invented them.'")
From TCM's website:
12:15 AM Broken Blossoms (1919)
In this silent film, an Asian man in London falls in love with an abused child. Cast: Lillian Gish, Richard Barthelmess, Donald Crisp. Dir: D.W. Griffith. BW-89 mins, TV-PG
Richard Barthelmess was born in 1895 to a theatrical family and was working on the stage when a friend of his mother, film star Alla Nazimova, offered him a part in her next film, War Brides. He made twenty-two movies over the next three years, but it was his performance as the Chinese immigrant Cheng Huan in D.W. Griffith's Broken Blossoms that brought him his most lasting fame. He followed that up with two more classics, Way Down East and Tol'able David, the former for Griffith again, the latter at Barthelmess's own newly-formed production company, Inspiration Pictures.
Barthelmess continued to make movies during the sound era, including The Last Flight which I reviewed earlier this week, and The Cabin in the Cotton with Bette Davis (the one where she says "I'd like to kiss you, but I just washed my hair"), but by and large his acting technique was too stiff for sound pictures and the size and number of his parts quickly diminished. Probably his last great film role was as Bat MacPherson in Howard Hawks's Only Angels Have Wings.
